09 November 2005

Measuring the success of your board - Part 2

Some other signs your community is quality and in good health:

  • Speedy answers to tricky questions - this thread on WMW puts forward the case: "When quick answers are the norm, that means that the forum is well-trafficked, has a good range of expertise among its posting members, and that the members care about responding to new questions"
  • A normal distribution of member postcounts - a healthy forum is one where all members contribute. A forum where the posting every day is dominated by a few 'elite' will often be fairly unwelcoming to others, and you won't benefit from the widerange of opinions that only a broad group of people can bring. If you wanted to quantify that, I guess you could plot a histogram of the posts-per-day average of your members - you'd want it all grouped close to the average (low standard deviation, for the more statistically inclined amongst you!)
  • Great community spirit - the signs of this are worth a topic all of their own, but rough-and-ready signs include members calling each other by their real-life names, having nicknames for each other (this is quite common), meeting up in real life, organising competitions and other projects together (without you pushing them or even suggesting it), and last but not least, lots of members actively making suggestions on how to improve the site - though this might also mean that you've got a poorly set out board and your members are exasperated, often it's a sign that your members want to stick around as much as they can, so want to make that time as valuable as possible.
  • Regular, frequent return visits - if you find members regularly visit your board several times a day, you know they're hooked!
  • Word-of-mouth referrals - your board is so good that people are making the effort to include it in conversation with their friends - wahey! Either that, or your reputation and authority (see A is for Authority) in your niche means that your site is the first one people can think of sending people to when they have a question to be answered or a passion to be fulfilled - sweet!

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08 November 2005

Measuring the success of your board

There's no consensus in the biz as to precisely what stats show the quality and healthiness of your board. In this post we'll be looking at what some of these stats - you're welcome of course to suggest your own by commenting below.

Let's start with the basics:
  • Postcount - the quick and easy stat, show on the index page of almost every board. A postcount of over 500,000 entitles you to inclusion into big-boards.com - Pros: easy stat, and a good indicator of the quantity of content on the site. Cons: An old board will have loads of posts - that doesn't mean they're recent, or good quality, or made by lots of members. Just because you see a big postcount, don't think a board is better than a smaller one, which for all you know has more members actively posting, and might be full of better quality posts. There's no telling how many of those posts are spam or crappy forum games like '3 word story'!
  • Member count - again, same pros/cons - an old site is more likely to have more members, but without looking deeper you might be admiring a site which does well in the search engines and has a nice skin, or gets people to sign up to get a gift of some sort, and hardly ever post or even return once they've signed up.
What about some other handy, general stats of the site:
  • Age of the site - you need to bear this in mind when looking at the two stats I've already mentioned. But old age is also a good thing in many cases: it demonstrates that a board has been around for a while, so is reliable and in good hands, and hasn't been forced to close because of inactivity or getting overwhelmed with spam. An old forum (assuming it's still active, not just a web skeleton) is most probably in good hands, so has high chances of being a good quality community.
  • Pagerank - Google PR may be totally irrelevant to the value of a site and a shite indicator of how it'll do in the search engines, it's still a good quick indicator of the number and popularity of the sites linking to it - a high PR will usually mean people are finding this forum interesting and good quality, so are linking to it.
  • Registrations per day - this is a rough measure of a combination of two things - how easily people are finding their way to your site (via Google, a link on another page, whatever), and how tempted they are to sign up (that's affected primarily by what they see, since they usually won't have had a chance to post yet) - i.e. how attractive the site looks, how easy it is to register, how obvious it is that the visitor would be better of signing up... etc.
  • Posts per day - I've never really like this particular site metric, for (one of) the reasons Postcount isn't a good stat either - these posts could all be from a core group of hardcore posters posting absolute shite, with nobody else involved, or it could be the ideal situation, loads of members posting on your site. Make sure you check out the Top #10 posters that day to get a sense of perspective - how many of today's posts were made by these guys? As a rough rule of thumb, the smaller the fraction of today's posts made by these 10, the healthier your community. If, as well as that low ratio, the board has a high posts per day average, you know you've got a big, healthy site.
  • Threads per day - I really like this stat, probably irrationally so. For me, any pair of jokers can hijack an existing thread and post loads of crap in it, making the board look busy. What doesn't normally happen though is postwhores going around creating new topics - that normally involves a bit more originality and brainpower than they're used to. Again, as with all stats, take this advice with a pinch of salt: topics per day is a good stat o determine the activity+health of a board, just so long as the other tests also throw up the same conclusions, else you might be prompted to investigate why lots of people create topics, but the other stats show the site to not be very active.
In Part 2, we'll look at what the telltale signs of success, failure, good or bad quality are for your actual community

03 November 2005

How unique is your community?

There are a hell of a lot of forums out there. How many rivals your community has depends on what your forum's about - obviously, there are loads of webmaster communities (e.g. WebMasterWorld, Sitepoint and Digitalpoint) but fewer about knitting.

It's safe to assume your newly-made board will have its fair share of competitors, often bigger and more popular than yours. That can change though - the biggest forums aren't always the oldest ones (though it helps).

If you want to succeed and get up there with your rivals (who knows, maybe even beat them!) you're going to have to focus on making your site stand out from the crowd. Improving the quality of posting and community spirit are important factors in getting people to stick around once they sign up, but you have to get them to sign up first!

Getting features unique to your site has several advantages:
  • it'll make people talk about your site, so you get increased word of mouth referrals
  • it'll give visitors something to remember your site by, so they're more likely to return
  • existing members have something here they can't get anywhere else, so stick around longer
  • it enhances the reputation of your site, helping to make you the authority in your niche
That last point is important: you can really show up your site as a heavywieght in the category when you've got some exciting, original and good looking features on your board, when your rivals still have the default skins installed, perhaps have added an Arcade mod, and an offtopic forum that's just full of typical post games like the Neverending Thread and the Three Word Story.

This highlights another thing - standing out doesn't just limit itself to getting a unique look skinned and some new features coded. You can stand out with competitions and fresh new ideas for threads - maybe you could encourage your members to make threads that are effectively 'blogs', each member having his own... I dunno - you know your own community better than I do. I'd be interested to hear what you guys have done to make your forums stand out amongst your competitors (you can add comments below).

The reason I was prompted to write this was that I've just finished coding a new feature for my own forums. This uses an RSS parser to pull data from the profiles of members on my site that use the excellent Last.fm and then show it on their profiles, e.g. to show the last five songs they've listened to. When I say finished, I haven't really - I want to add lots more details (top five tracks, most played songs, favourite artists, etc). I've also added a link to people's last.fm pages just above their signature. Obviously, this only shows up if they've put a Last.fm ID in their profile. The next step is to totally rework the profile page so it's a lot more inviting, and getting away from the standard Invision profile page look. The theory behind this is that if I can make people use the profile pages more, I can get a stronger community spirit on my board, the advantages of which are dicussed here.

You can see the new feature in action on my profile page over at Rockforums.net and on threads like this one - note the 'What I Listen To' button under the second post. Another feature I've added, which is in part designed to increase clicks on Adsense banners, is the trivia/board tips/google adsense banner rotation in the top right corner, which shows something new each time you refresh the page/go to another one.